originally via MSNBC [no less!]:

Consumers have no idea how reliable their cell phone service will be when they buy a phone and sign a long-term contract. The Federal Communications Commission could offer some guidance, but it won't. The agency refuses to make public a detailed database of cell phone provider outages that it has maintained since 2004.

A federal Freedom of Information Act request for the data, filed in August by MSNBC.com, has been rejected by the agency. The stated reasons: Release of the information could help terrorists plan attacks against the United States, and it would harm the companies involved.

Complaints about cell phone service are near the top of every list of consumer gripes. The Illinois attorney general's office, for example, last year ranked cell phone complaints as the fourth-most-common complaint, trailing only gas prices, credit card firms and home improvement scams.

To find out if a cell phone carrier service will be reliable, consumers are forced to buy a phone, then use it at home and on their normal commuting routes. Callers generally get 30 days at most to return a phone if the service doesn't work well enough.

But that test won't reveal anything about carriers' periodic outages.

The Federal Communications Commission does know something about outages, however. It has collected outage reports from telecommunications firms since the early 1990s. Any time a carrier has an outage that affects 900,000 caller minutes—say a 30-minute outage impacting 30,000 customers—it must report it to the Network Outage Reporting System.

…

Tompkins said the blanket removal of the entire outage report system from public view was symptomatic of a larger trend in the Bush administration.

"Every time we turn around something else is a national security issue," he said.

Furthermore, if some larger pattern of cell phone outages could be gleaned from the reports, he said, companies might "fix it, not bury it."

"I can't think of one problem that has gone away because it's kept a secret," he said.

→ read the entire article

→ get involved

via <nettime> nettime-1 [received 20061217]:

The Free Software Foundation [FSF] today launched BadVista.org, a campaign with a twofold mission of exposing the harms inflicted on computer users by the new Microsoft Windows Vista and promoting free software alternatives that respect users' security and privacy rights.

"Vista is an upsell masquerading as an upgrade. It is an overall regression when you look at the most important aspect of owning and using a computer: your control over what it does. Obviously MS Windows is already proprietary and very restrictive, and well worth rejecting. But the new 'features' in Vista are a Trojan Horse to smuggle in even more restrictions. We'll be focusing attention on detailing how they work, how to resist them, and why people should care," said FSF program administrator John Sullivan.

The campaign will organize supporters into effective and unusual actions drawing attention to this daylight theft of computer users' rights, aggregate news stories cutting through the Vista marketing propaganda, and provide a user-friendly gateway to the adoption of free software operating systems like gNewSense.

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thanks Donna:

Google Map Creator is a freeware application designed to make thematic mapping using Google Maps simpler. The software is part of the GeoVUE Project at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis [CASA].

If you have a shape file [and the associated bits], this free piece of software by Richard Milton of CASA will let you create a Google Map of the data and provide you with a web page which you can then publish.

→ more info
→ get it

[ an interesting article in this month's adaptive path newsletter on tagging. we couldn't find the article or newsletter anywhere on their site, so we took the liberty of reproducing it in its entirety here. ]

Tagging vs. Cataloging: What It's All About by Chiara Fox

Tags have taken the internet by storm. Where once the question was "what are they," now all people want to know is whether a given site offers them. But what are the actual benefits of tags? What motivates millions of Flickr, del.icio.us and blog users to add tags to their photos and posts? And what is it about tags and tagging that gets information architects and user experience professionals so excited?

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via the Journal Sentinel:

"Back in the roaring '90s, digital luminaries declared that businesses either go online or out of business. This week, metro Milwaukee debuts on the Internet.

"The Milwaukee 7, a relatively new economic development organization that spans seven counties, is putting the finishing touches on ChooseMilwaukee.com, a $200,000 site that's meant to beam flashy graphics and reams of southeastern Wisconsin data to a global audience of potential investors and expansion-minded industries.

"Though it might be arriving late, it intends to arrive with a splash. The Web portal is set to go live by Wednesday, in time for the next quarterly meeting of the M-7's board, and will include a tool that Milwaukee has never seen before: interactive maps that zero in on available land, warehouses, offices or factories, cataloged according to specifications typed in by companies that might be looking to expand in the Midwest.

"From there, the maps zoom in and out. Aerial images from satellites pop up alongside conventional street-level photos of each prospective location. The site recombines the data with analysis of local income levels, business competition, worker skills and education demographics of the population within any chosen radius of any of the sites. It shows what percentage finished college and how many got through high school.

"It even tells out-of-towners how many inches of snow fall on Milwaukee in a typical winter [53], while touting the metro area’s commuting times, arts scene and quality-of-life assets.

…

"If a showy Web page is enough to hook the attention of a Chinese or French multinational, the M-7 aims to reel them in with its Resource Center—an auditorium in downtown Milwaukee with a wall-size, high-definition screen that barrages out-of-town delegations with videos, maps, data and images. After a virtual tour of possible sites, Resource Center visitors are meant to leave with an armload of customized reports on the places they can visit, and possibly find cars and drivers waiting outside to show them around.

"The Resource Center also opens for business Wednesday, in time for the M-7 board meeting. And while the Web site might be an effort to play catch-up, the Resource Center has the potential to put Milwaukee near the front of the curve."

→ read the entire article

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Q: [1] Does anyone have what they deem to be accurate zip code boundaries? [2] If so, where did you get them or how did you build them? I have not yet found a reliable source of zip code boundary data… including the Post Office.

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[ welcome to the matrix, right? while the labs has yet to enter second life [hell, we struggle enough with the first one], did you know that reuters has opened a bureau in second life? ]

via GameSpot news:

At the end of March, Second Life had 165,000 "residents," and now it boasts more than 1 million. But just like in the real world, as the population grows, so do the crime statistics. There have been a series of phishing scams, last week a copybot threatened the intellectual property created for the game, and now a rapidly replicating worm has briefly closed the online world to visitors.

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Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol.

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